Confusenet about usenet (why better than bittorrent?)

I've been a bittorrent user for years now. Seems like I can find anything in great abundance. So XBMC: why so usenet?

I've purchased subscriptions to astraweb and giganews, I've signed up for news search engines, and i've configured sickbeard and sbaznbd and I find that the results so far are underwhelming. Seems like I've not downloaded more than I've downloaded, older TV series being a perfect example.

Is it a sign I've not configured my setup properly? Should I be seeing awesome results from Usenet?

I thank you for your replies! I believe you when you say you think I'm doing something wrong.

@clubwerks I tried malcolm in the middle and pokemon original series, and struck out both times. In the case of Smallville, I was able to get season ten but nothing earlier.

I am having massive fail with my first attempt at all this in general, so I probably did something wrong. I just wanted to pose the question to you guys and see if I was wrong in my hypothesis and I see I most likely am.

I'm going back and starting from scratch on my Mac Mini, starting with reinstalling sabnzdPlus and sickbeard, and the Mac addon for renaming titles.

I think that when someone sets up automated systems, you need to be able to initially think that you can check it out manually, just to be sure that it's working ok.

You mention finding older stuff. which tends to imply that your SabnzbD/Sickbeard is working, it just didn't find things you were expecting.

It might be an idea (on your mac/pc?) to manually log in to your nzb search engine and check the tvshows that you're looking for and see what's there on the search engine. If there is stuff you're interested in and sickbeard hasn't spotted it, it tends to imply that your sickbeard/search criterior is wrong.

SSL does not make you anonymous. Pirating content is very much illegal in both the US and Canada. (unless you mean to say that BitTorrent is illegal by itself? It's not). ISPs are moving to throttling all traffic of users it deems as "using too much", so what port you use won't matter.